What is a Political Party?

The US is exceptional among “global north” nations in that it does not have an explicitly socialist/worker party. Since approximately the 1940s, this circumstance pushed the socialist and communist left to either support the Democratic Party or completely abstain from the electoral field of struggle.

The first glimmer of renewed interest in this field from the radical left came with Kshama Sawant winning a Seattle city council seat in 2014. Two years later, the socialist left grew and was further electrified with Bernie Sanders running for president as an open “democratic socialist”, albeit from within the Democratic Party. Since then, radicals from around the country have been experimenting with electoral politics and the larger goal of building a viable, left-wing alternative to the Democratic Party.

But what does it mean to build a party, why are they necessary, and what are some contemporary examples of attempts to build them?

What They Are

Let's start by looking at two sources for definitions of a political party: Oxford Reference and Encyclopedia Britannica.

• Oxford Reference: In democratic societies, parties are organizations that link actors in civil society to the formal structures of government. Political parties typically form around groups that share values, interests, or backgrounds.
• Encyclopedia Britannica: Group of persons organized to acquire and exercise political power. … All parties develop a political program that defines their ideology and sets out the agenda they would pursue should they win elective office or gain power through extra-parliamentary means.

These definitions have in common that a party is a group of like-minded people contesting for state power primarily, but not exclusively, through elections. Along the way, the party is promoting the shared politics and vision. With this definition, a party can cover a large nation, a small ward, or anywhere in between regardless of whether or not that party has it's own ballot.

We see other examples of like-minded people coalescing in human society. When musical people get together because of shared interests, they tend to form bands, potentially pioneering new genres of music. Engineers with shared interests might collaborate on building groundbreaking hardware or software. In politics, this leads to political movements and organizations, like parties.

This collective approach to elections is crucial to combat the individualism of US elections. Our electoral system involves self-appointed candidates who build their platforms based on their donors' desires and largely run on their personalities. When election season comes around, they build temporary campaign machines that “get out the vote”. Win or lose, these campaign machines are folded up as soon as the election is over. This approach avoids long-term organization-building because the last thing the ruling class wants is people building vehicles to hold their politicians accountable, much less to build political groups that represent the interests of the working classes.

In contrast, a party can provide the community and infrastructure to recruit members, develop their politics and organizing skills, and run them for office. If or when this isn’t possible, a membership base with experience organizing together can also have honest discussions about whether or not to endorse non-party members for a given election. Whether or not the candidate emerges from the party, it can provide the infrastructure to assist, push, and even challenge the candidate after they win office. The individualist, autocratic approach to elections is replaced with a collective and democratic approach.

While electoral work is the priority for parties within democracies, it is what they uniquely contribute to the political ecosystem, they can not limit themselves to electoral work. For a party to thrive, it needs to join in solidarity work with communities and organizations engaged in struggle.

Solidarity work:

• Builds trust and community with other organizers and communities
• Is mutually beneficial because strong social struggles help defend and “till the soil” for politics which will shape future elections
• Provides more opportunities to train and develop party members
• Politically sharpens the party to keep its members grounded when engaging with the rich and powerful in the electoral field

There are pitfalls for parties to avoid. Organizers tend to have an understandable desire to “pick every fight”. Capitalism is full of constant crises, but it's impossible to join every fight, much less lead them all. When there is capacity, it’s important to identify which group in the political ecosystem is best positioned to lead. For example, if the crisis involves tenants fighting a landlord, it would be best for a tenant union to lead the fight and the party to uplift and support it.

Ideally, organizations build capacity to fulfill their priority work while also building community in tandem. For example, 33rd Ward Working Families organized a fundraiser for asylum-seeker mutual aid without losing the priority of campaigning during the 2024 primaries.

A party also creates space for people to find a political home, as members, casual canvassers, or attendees at a social event. A place where they can feel open and honest about their politics instead of feeling like they have to hide or apologize. This is also a form of political community building. As Marx stated in The German Ideology, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”

Meaning, that the “common sense” ideas about race, gender, public safety, etc. all spring up from the needs of the ruling class and are reinforced by politicians, news outlets, TV shows, etc. With a political home, people can come together to vent and discuss the latest news items, like abortion bans or the migrant crisis, and then organize to do something about it.

Why They Exist

The very existence of parties represents a material recognition that humans are social animals. We are constantly in conversation with each other to discuss world events and solutions to problems.

You can see a miniature version of this whenever people watch sports together. People will regularly comment and debate what they think a team/player needs to do to score the next point or win the game. Similarly, discussion of the news around the dinner table or the water cooler are universal phenomenon because all humans feel an interest in how our world works and how to make it better.

As social animals, there is also an implicit understanding that no one person can have all the answers. It is through discussion that we collectively gain clarity and weigh our options on how to move forward. But anyone who has ever tried to participate in a discussion with a large group of people knows that it can quickly become chaotic, often veering far from the original topic. Now imagine trying to organize public discourse across an entire country!

What political parties provide is a centralizing structure for focused debate within shared political boundaries. For example, it would be difficult for anti-abortion and pro-choice people to come together and iron out solutions for universal reproductive freedom. But within a left-wing party, united on reproductive freedom, organizers could debate strategy and tactics without having to waste time explaining the baseline need for abortion access. Instead, time could be spent figuring out how to fight for these demands.

A party can then pool its members and resources to promote the perspectives that emerged from the internal debate. This can influence broader public discourse by taking these perspectives into active movements and various forms of media: taking the party’s talking points full circle to the dinner table and water cooler. In this way, political parties are essential to help shape and organize public debate about how best to solve social problems.

As an organization, a party can also weather the ups and downs of social struggle. Currently, movements come and go, usually dependent on self-motivated independent actors to document the positive and negative lessons from those struggles. A party can serve as a memory of these struggles, preserving the knowledge across movements rather than having to learn/relearn with each upsurge. In effect, a party can become the memory of the working class.

Democrats, Republicans,
and Social Democrats

The Democrats and Republicans are the US's only two “official” parties. That this is a two-party system is not, by itself, a major problem. The problem is that, since the founding of the Democrats in 1828 and the Republicans in 1854, they have both been parties committed to capitalism. In practice, this has made them vehicles to represent the two wings of the capitalist class. The problem is that the working class does not have a party to represent it, much less its left-wing.

The ruling class is often pictured as a monolith, but they are a class of humans that need to discuss and debate their perspectives just like the rest of us. These two parties make space for the ruling class to debate their approaches to ruling the rest of us. Deliberately limiting our electoral system to parties that only represent the two wings of the capitalist class politically and psychologically forces all of us to join the discussions of how we should be ruled. In other words, the two pro-capitalist parties allow the capitalist class to organize itself. Conversely, the absence of a socialist/labor party keeps the working class disorganized.

This is important to understand because Democrats and Republicans are portrayed as opposite ends of the left/right spectrum. But in reality, Democrats represent “centrism” while Republicans represent “conservatism”. Meaning, that the US does not have a left-wing party. Worse, centristists are hardwired to compromise. Their unwillingness to commit to either political pole puts them in “the center”. Faced with an uncompromising Republican party that Trump and the far-right increasingly influence, Democrats are increasingly compromising to the right, further distorting how people perceive left vs right in the US.

In contrast to the US system of two parties that only reflect capitalist interests, we can look to other world powers that have had actual left-wing parties, usually called “social democratic”, to understand why they are necessary. Britain with its Labour Party was able to establish the National Healthcare System. France with its Socialist and Communist parties built an even more robust welfare state. The Nordic states, like Sweden, all boast famously robust welfare states which are often compared to "actual socialism", and were established by parties like Sweden’s Social Democratic Party. These parties provided coalition space to unite unions, leftist groups, and more to win major struggles and get the goods.

If the Republican and Democratic parties provide space for the capitalists to discuss how they rule us, a workers party would provide working people space to better understand our class, recognize our collective interests, and ultimately fight to overthrow the ruling class to win our collective liberation.

To be clear, having a left-wing party is not, by itself, a guarantee of anything. Parties can rise and fall, become corrupted, etc. While the parties listed have all achieved tremendous advances, they often also led the attack of neoliberalism since the 1970s. Despite that, the public welfare systems of these countries still put US healthcare and education to shame. But without a left-wing party, our class can’t cohere its consciousness and coalesce its social movements into a unified force.

The Ballot Question

In the US, only Republicans and Democrats are guaranteed ballot representation. All other parties, whether left/right-wing, must meet exorbitant thresholds of signature gathering on a state-by-state and office-by-office basis to have their ballot. Even if a third party can get on the ballot, they then have to be prepared to deal with lawsuits and other challenges from Republicans and Democrats trying to kick them off.

In practice, this often forces leftists interested in elections to run on the Democratic Party ballot. For some, this is fine because “the real work” is to push the Democrats to the left. For others, this is unacceptable, and no matter the material impossibility of getting on the ballot, that is the only worthy avenue.

But instead of following these binary options, what about a dialectical approach? What if organizers serious about elections used the Democratic ballot as long as they could, and used that time to build up a party infrastructure with a long-term goal of eventually having their own ballot? This may seem abstract, but let's consider some examples from Chicago that appear to be trending in this direction.

On Chicago’s Northwest Side, there are ward organizations like 30th United, The People’s 32nd, 33rd Ward Working Families, United Neighbors of the 35th Ward, 39th Ward Neighbors United, and United Northwest Side. 33WF and UN35 have been around since 2015 and have launched successful election and re-election campaigns over the last 9 years, most notably taking Rossana Rodríguez Sánchez and Carlos Ramirez Rosa into aldermanic office.

During the 2023 mayoral campaign, all of these organizations were able to collaborate to help take Brandon Johnson, a candidate with less than 3% name recognition, into the mayor's office of the 3rd largest US city.

In 2024, northwest side ward organizations took it to the next level and swept Graciela Gúzman into IL State Senate in a 4-way race, against well over $2.6M, with nearly 55% of the vote. In all of these races, the ward organizations beat the “official” Democratic Party candidate.

All of these victories required learning how to secure permanent offices, organize canvasses, manage social media, design and acquire printed literature, fundraising, canvasser recruitment, and in some cases, the development of precinct captain programs. Between elections, they necessitated other forms of community organizing and solidarity work to sharpen the organizations, recruit, and create networks that can lend some form of assistance during campaign seasons. This is what it means to build up infrastructure and to do it in a way that is not simply agitational but also determined to win. It would not have been possible to learn these things simply from books or the sidelines.

With so many organizations collaborating to win office for Brandon and Graciela: weren’t they already acting like a party? With so many organizations building up the infrastructure of experience, networks, and literal offices, is it so difficult to imagine them forming a larger umbrella organization? What if, through continued opportunities to collaborate and build trust, they might officially coalesce into a party with its own ballot?

Conclusion

A political party can take on various forms. The current shape of both the Republican and Democratic parties is mostly a label that people identify with and vote for every election season. Between elections, people who identify with either party have very limited opportunities to interact with them (if any) and no way to define their platform or priorities. During elections, both parties rely on polling, mailers, and media ads to mobilize people. In other words, the institutional parties are hollow.

Electoral and community work are inextricably linked. Organizers who are willing to take the electoral field of struggle seriously can build up infrastructure that fills this political vacuum, talking to community members and local organizations to build relationships and more deeply organize across wards, neighborhoods, districts, etc. We can use our physical offices as beachheads for political and community events, sharing them with other organizations as needed. We can hit doors and talk to our neighbors in a passionate way that the hollow parties can’t with their TV ads or paid canvassers.

Any group of like-minded people, fighting for state power can constitute a party. How much infrastructure and knowledge they can build depends on various material conditions in a given area. But with the Democratic Party’s complicity in unseating Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, and the refusal of the DNC to allow any Palestinian party members a chance to speak during the 4-day convention: the time is now to learn from experiments like the ones in Chicago and build towards a party of our own. Fortunately, groups like the United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America are starting to point the way forward with public calls for a labor party.

Update 09/24/24: Adds "regardless of whether or not that party has it's own ballot" and "state power" for specificity.